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Helen Keller

I visited Helen Keller’s childhood home in Tuscumbia, Alabama the week before last. I need to rewatch the Miracle Worker, but it was pretty amazing seeing the actual setting for so many famous scenes.  The Water Pump is, of course, a focal point.

The tour guide was telling us her IQ was tested at 160, and that she learned Braille in something like 4 or 5 other languages.

She was also a socialist, and here is the point I wanted to make.  Can anyone say that, as a blind and deaf person, she saw less of, or heard less from, American workers than the average socialist, than Karl Marx, than a typical academic?  As someone who was likely always willing to “listen”, she perhaps was more in touch than most of them.  In her era, socialism had still not failed decisively, so it was still possible then for intelligent, decent human beings to believe in it.  That obviously is not the case any more.

It is an astonishing fact that most of the Democrats who arrogate to themselves the right to speak for “the workers”, or for that matter “the blacks”, or “the Hispanics” or others–politicians who use identity politics in their daily schtick–don’t live in their neighborhoods.  They don’t have the rank and file over for dinner.  Their kids don’t go to their schools.  They don’t even visit, other than for occasional campaign stops, their neighborhoods.  They know virtually nothing about their lives, what they need, other than that if they say certain words, promise certain things, that they can usually get their votes.

And in power, they ignore them.  All Communist regimes have shit on the actual workers, outside of a core party cadre they needed to maintain power and discipline.  All the rhetoric–all the alleged REASON for their political activities in the first place–is not based, in nearly all cases, on actual people, but on abstractions which they use for their own benefit, and which never reference living, breathing, hurting dying working human beings.